“I really strive to reverse the old adage that what you see is what you get. If I can be Coyote and practice my sneak-up, I can engage the viewers from a distance with one image and lure them in for exposure to another layer, which changes the initial view into quite a different reality. After all, this is what ethnic culture is all about – or even an ongoing relationship. What you see on the surface is never the same again once you begin to plumb the depths.”

Interview with Larry Abbott in “I stand in the Center of the Good” 1994 University of Nebraska Press, page 219

Among the strongest works in the show are those in which Smith appropriates Western art history to get her activist messages across…In the past, Smith has been criticized for being retardataire in her use of various European and American modernisms – an unfair criticism, considering that the appropriation of Modernist styles is a common denominator of recent post-Modern art. In this show eclecticism and irony are the order of the day, the unmistakable tools of the post-Modernist, and also age old hallmarks of traditional Native American art. Smith continues to straddle the categories of “ethnic” and “Mainstream” , rendering them at least momentarily, obsolete.